In the Words of Alberto Garcia

Bookstore employee interview:

Alberto Garcia, store manager for Barnes and Noble at University Park Village

CK: Explain the history of bookselling for you?

Alberto Garcia: “It started 17 years ago for me. I was going to school at A&M and just wanted to get a part-time job, and when I came here for summer months, I started working part time at a Bookstop, which was another bookstore chain and was owned by Barnes and Noble. They’ve all be shut down now. I started in a Bookstop then, and just fell in love with working books. I loved getting books in and putting  them on the shelf, and talking with customers about books. So I started as a part time bookseller, even after graduating, I ended up staying, and 17 years later, I’m not store manager. I’ve been a store manager at three different Barnes and Noble stores now over the last 10 years. I just love the book business, mostly I love interacting with customers, making my suggestions and getting from them the books that they like, so I can pass that information along to other customers too.”

CK: How long at this B&N?

Alberto Garcia: Since February 2005. It’s been a long time at this Barnes and Noble store. Out of all the Barnes and Noble stores I’ve been at, I really enjoy this one out of all the other ones I’ve worked at.”

CK: Do you deal a lot with publishers and authors directly?

Goodnight Cowtown

Alberto Garcia: “We do a lot of that ourselves. Obviously since we’re a corporation, a percentage of our books that we’re getting in are already pre-determined because we already have buyers at our home office that will purchase books directly from publishers. Here, locally, at the store we have say over what we carry too. Unlike other retail stores, like say the Gap, what you see is what you get there. Usually the store can’t order more pairs of jeans or anything like that. Here we can tailor our store to what the community wants, and that’s where we do our in-store ordering here. We do order a lot of books from publishers, but the majority do come from our home office, but we can add on and get more books here. And more than anything else, we order a lot more local titles, because obviously, in New York, they’re not going to know about the Fort Worth or Texas books that people are asking for here, so we do a lot more local ordering for books for this area. The biggest seller over the past year has been a children’s book for Fort Worth Goodnight Cowtown. But it’s something that our company didn’t know anything about, and, obviously, it would really only sell in the Fort Worth area. Somebody in Seattle really isn’t going to care about a book called Goodnight Cowtown about the city of Fort Worth. So we do a lot of local ordering here ourselves.”

CK: Have you seen a change in readers’ appetites for books and what are selling most, over the past few years?
Alberto Garcia: “One of the biggest changes because when I started 17 years ago, the only books people knew about were the ones on the shelves. If you were looking for a biography on Benjamin Franklin, you only knew about the four different books that were on that shelf. You might find a few more at the library, but you weren’t exposed to all the different books that are out there on that subject. Over the last 10 or 15 years, with the Internet, a lot of people do a lot more research before they come into a store. So they’ll know about the 150 books available on Benjamin Franklin. We might only carry the four or five in our store, but there’s a lot more available out there. Our store is a typical-sized Barnes and Noble store. We have room for 125,000 titles. There’s three million books in print. Obviously we can’t carry everything that’s available, so we call ourselves book sellers, but in a way we’ve become book finders because people will come in asking for items that we don’t always have in stock immediately, so we have to find ways to get those for our customers whether it’s carrying it in other Barnes and Noble stores in the area or ordering it, finding it for them through one of our other third-party distributors. We’ve become book finders over the years because people can see more of the titles that are available, but it doesn’t necessarily mean their neighborhood bookstore is going to carry it. There’s just no possible way we can have a bookstore that carries three million books – it’s just not possible – but our distribution center can and can ship those out to us in a timely manner for our customers. For different subjects, the changes over the years, when I started, every Barnes and Noble store had a whole aisle of books on cassette, and I remember through the years, that section would get smaller and smaller and books on CDs would get larger and larger. And then also the rise of the Sudoku books. That was something that was unheard of 10 years ago, and then all of a sudden it just exploded. Every Barnes and Noble store is going to be different [because] we tailor it to the community. This store, in particular, we sell half the company average in graphic novels and Manga because we just don’t have that kind of customer here. A lot of our customers here are older, so we sell a lot more fiction, a lot more hard covers – a little bit more expensive books – versus like, say, one of our stores that’s connected to a mall, like our South Arlington Parks Mall store. They have a lot more younger customers there because of the mall traffic, and they sell twice what we sell in graphic novels and Manga. It changes from location to location what each Barnes and Noble store will carry and what the community wants.”

CK: Has that demographic always been that way?

Alberto Garcia: “It has been. It’s very literate, a little bit older crowd here in this area, and they’re also very proud that they’re from Texas and from Fort Worth. Again, we sell huge number of books on Fort Worth. Anything having to do with Fort Worth does really well here. Like I said, one of the best selling books over the past 12 months has been Goodnight Cowtown. That’s something that’s not going to sell anywhere else, but at the same time, if they made something like that for Dallas, you wouldn’t see that kind of buzz in Dallas – and I’ve managed a couple stores in the Dallas area also – like you do here in Fort Worth. The people here are very proud of being from Fort Worth and love books about Fort Worth. Where you don’t have that kind of passion about being from Dallas in Dallas.”

CK: Has there been any shift or change with e-books?

Alberto Garcia: “Definitely there has been. One of the biggest thing has been the decline in romance sales in our stores because the biggest selling category for e-books is romance. So people will buy a ton of romance novels on the e-reader, but they’re not buying anymore in print. It kind of has brought down in-store sales of romance books, even though the number of romance books is increasing because they’re getting a lot more on the e-readers. Everyone thought that years ago when e-readers were really starting to catch on that it would be a decline in the book business, and it hasn’t really been yet. There’s been a shift in some aspects, but when we sell a Nook here, a majority of customers still come back into the store, they’re still looking for other books here. Sometimes they’ll buy a book in print while they’re actually looking for another book to buy on their e-reader in the store. We see people in here all the time with their Nooks, but they’re browsing our shelves to see what they can download for their Nook. So they still have to get an idea of what they want to purchase within a bookstore, but at the same time, that doesn’t stop them necessarily from ever buying a print book because not every book is still available as an e-book anyway. There’s going to be items, [like] bargain books. [There’s] still a lot of very picture-intensive items like photography books, art books, interior design books – you just don’t find that many of them on e-readers because the fact that if you have a plain ol’ ink e-reader, you’re not going to be able to see all the graphics on that device, and even on a regular tablet, it might be a 7-inch tablet where you might want to see the full, maybe, 15-inch spread of a photography book or  an interior design book. You know, you want that larger page with the larger photos. So a lot of sections like that haven’t caught on onto e-readers, and I don’t know if they’ll ever catch on. They’re still more of a genre that fits more within the printed format instead of the e-reader format.”

CK: Has there been a shift in children’s novels on e-readers or has that stayed steady?

Alberto Garcia: ”For us, it’s stayed the same. We haven’t seen any significant decline in our children’s sales. What happens a lot of the time, is that they’re exposed to more books. Like I said, they’ll come in looking for ideas, but they’ll still buy books. They buy almost the same number of printed books as in the past, but they’re also buying items for their e-readers on top of that, so they’re getting more books than they would in the past. And, again, there’s still going to be some items that don’t translate well over to the e-reader format. If you think about picture books, they just don’t transfer to a smaller screen. If you look on a 7-inch screen, the text would be too small for a child to read. It’s great for them to have for some of the beginning reading books or even older kids, kind of in the 7- to 12-year-old range when they’re starting to read. Some of the young reader books, getting into those kind of formats. But, especially for picture books for really small kids, a 7-inch screen – even a 9-inch screen – might still be too small for the text for the child to really be able to read.”

CK: Has movie and music section been the same and what else has been added outside of books besides movies and music to engage more people?

Alberto Garcia: “The music business has changed for just about every retailer. The amount of CDs that we carry today versus what we carried seven years ago is much less, but the decrease has been offset by the number of DVDs we carry. When I got to this store years ago, the music department was about 90 percent music and 10 percent DVDs, and now it’s more of a 60 percent DVDs, 40 percent CDs, so it’s kind of shifted in that way. In other areas of the store, it’s the increase in space we’ve allotted in all of our stores for all of our educational toys and games, especially for the kids, and the way we have it divided up between age groups. With those educational toys there, and then on the other side of the store we have adult games and puzzles, so there’s are different things we’ve added to all Barnes and Noble stores to be more of a one-stop-shop other than just specifically for people who just want to get books.”

CK: Anything to add?

Alberto Garcia: “I’ve been very happy in the 17 years I’ve worked with Barnes and Noble. I love working with books. Obviously, I wish more people shopped for books and the items that we sell here, but I love interacting with customers here in the stores. I wouldn’t see myself doing other types of retail if I wasn’t doing this job. This is the only retail I could do because I love the product that we’re selling. I love interacting with customers who are coming in here looking for the types of items we sell here.”

CK: Would you consider yourself an avid reader?

Alberto Garcia: “Yeah. I probably average about 1-2 books a week.

CK: Do you prefer printed books or e-readers?

Alberto Garcia: “I still prefer the printed book, but I probably do about half and half now because a lot of items I’ll get in e-book format, so I’ll have to read it on my Nook. But I still buy books in printed format when I’m buying things from our store here. Most of the time I still prefer to buy it in a printed format, and if you could see the library in my house, you would know that I spend probably way too much money on printed books.”

CK: When was the change for you from printed to e-book?

Alberto Garcia: “It’s been kind of a slow transition. The great thing about e-readers is their portability. Where my e-reader has about 700 books on it. I can’t carry 700 books around with me, so it’s great for when I don’t really know what I want to read, but I want to have the choices if I’m going on vacation somewhere or going out of town, somewhere where I just need something for a quick read, or I don’t want to know  what I want to have with me, I’ll take the e-reader because it has so much on it that I can always find something to keep me busy reading.”

CK: Anything else?

Alberto Garcia: “Even though I’m an avid reader and I know a lot about books after being in the business for so long, I don’t know everything about every single book we have on the shelf. If somebody asks me what my favorite romance title is, I don’t have a favorite romance title because I’ve never read a romance book, but I could tell you what the bestsellers are and what the most popular books are. I can tell you which ones other customers are coming in for, asking for, and recommending to us. What a lot of us here will do is we’ll read book news sources, like The New York Times book review [and] different papers and magazines that offer quick little book reviews, so you may not have had time before to read that book, but you can find out what people are saying about it, whether they say it’s a great book, a bad book, or whatever the case may be."